The Changing Face of Television

There was time, not so long ago, when television programming was considered one of the lowest common denominators when it came to visual media.  We had our entertaining shows here and there, but for the most part the recipes were simple.  This was in part because most television companies no doubt thought of their audiences as simple, unable to digest more than 30 minutes or an hour at a time without wanting to change channels and move on to the next great thing.  In recent years, however, the introduction of serious television programming via pay-TV channels such as HBO and Showtime, and the subsequent adoption of the serious format by mainstream channels, has changed the way people perceive the serialized format that television has to offer.  And while there is still plenty of room to grow, we’re now seeing television being used as the primary way to convey epic, complex and sometimes controversial pieces of fiction.

There are a few shows that really stand out to me when it comes to how things have changed.  Most of the early shows ended up on pay-TV, mainly because they elected to use foul language and show nudity.  I remember seeing the show Rome when it first came out and being blown away that there was a watch-by-the-week program that I actually felt was worth tuning in to.  It wasn’t a sitcom, it wasn’t a soap opera, but it still managed to compel me to come back every week.  People were realizing that a long-term story could be told with television, that their viewers weren’t going to flake out if they missed an episode or came in late.

There are several other shows that helped speed this along.  X-Files helped in part.  This show straddled the line between one-off episodes and a permanent, deeper-level storyline.  Most of the early incarnations of this more complex form of television used a similar tactic.  This allowed them to draw new people in with unconnected episodes while rewarding those that stayed loyal to the program in the long-term.  It also allowed for higher levels of character development that things like sitcoms could rarely touch on.  Another one that I’m particularly fond of was Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  With a mix of different writing styles, the networks could toy with this idea of creating one, long story as opposed to many smaller ones.

At a certain point, the HBO/Showtime phenomenon began to snowball.  We began to see shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, Arrested Development, Dead Like Me, The Wire and countless others.  These shows started to win tons of awards and people took notice.  When these shows wound down and finally ended their stories, people got sad that they would no longer be able to see new episodes.  Before, a series got cancelled once it had run out of steam, but the concept of ending a money-maker on the basis of its tale being finished wasn’t exactly a popular one.

And so the idea has been solidified - make a series based off of the story you want to tell, not off of ending conveniently at each season just in case you end up getting cancelled.  Even comedies now have the leisure of planning out their seasons in full instead of just grabbing up a pile of scripts and deciding which ones are the best.  People want more from television and the companies have to respond in order to keep up.

In recent years, AMC has been a key factor in turning the tide from bite-sized to year-long storytelling.  Such amazing shows as Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead proved that people really do want to stay engaged in a show for years.  They don’t just want to see the same characters popping up in new situations, but they want consequences, complex character development and a world that feels alive.  Perhaps more interesting, people want characters to die.  Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that people expect characters to die.  And even if you kill off their favorites, they will still keep tuning in to route for someone new.  Television shows have become a realm of cause and effect.  Gone are the days when everything that transpired last week is conveniently forgotten so that they story can take some new, unexpected twist.  Well, perhaps not gone, but at least fading away.

There are still plenty of things that need to happen for this trend to reach its best potential, however.  The concept of a pilot episode needs to go away completely.  The merit of a new show can not be properly based upon an hour or two-hour long episode that tries to cram everything into a bite-sized package.  This is the very antithesis of effective storytelling and it dooms hundreds if not thousands of shows every year. 

The other major thing is the adherence to a set number of episodes in a season.  Again, this forces writers to work within time frames as opposed to creating a story that is properly paced.  Thus, filler ends up throughout a story that should be shorter and a story that should be longer ends up losing some of its strength.  Luckily, this concept has begun to shift.  We’re seeing more variant numbers when it comes to seasonal production.  No longer are we a slave to the 23(ish)-episode season.  Companies have always toyed with this number, but today it’s less set in stone.

One more thing, something that makes me hopeful for the future, is the presence of Netflix.  Now that the online-only provider is producing its own series (and being copied by other companies), “regular” television must get more competitive.  Outside producers are already flocking to Netflix to release their own products, including such prestigious names as Disney.  The next thing to go will be, in my opinion, regular air times (just order it when you want it!), split premiere dates (that horrible habit of putting something out in the UK earlier than the US) and possibly even weekly air dates (Netflix releases entire seasons at once).  And then?  No more regular TV programming, just a world where we order what we want to watch, when we want to watch it.  I’d be okay with that.

Will this mean the end of the classic style of 23-minute brain candy?  Not likely.  What it does mean is that we, the viewers, will be able to enjoy quality television shows with expertly written stories and that we’ll have a wide variety of said shows to choose from.  It is, in my opinion, the beginning of a time when television will be taken more seriously than the popcorn and blockbuster movies that have already begun to grow tiresome.  A Golden Age of TV, if you will.

Photo Credits -

Old Television courtesy of Alf van Beem via Wikicommons

Rome courtesy of soundonsight.org

Breaking Bad courtesy of blogs.nd.edu